


you taught me the courage of stars before you left

by EverythingButTheKitchenSink (ElvisHasLeftTheBuilding)



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: M/M, Newt Lives (Maze Runner), Post-Canon Fix-It, Teresa Agnes Lives, Teresa Agnes Redemption, movie-verse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29979069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElvisHasLeftTheBuilding/pseuds/EverythingButTheKitchenSink
Summary: One year after his supposed death, Newt wakes up in a WCKD facility. He's been Cured of the Flare virus, and his savior turns out to be the unlikeliest person possible.
Relationships: Newt & Thomas (Maze Runner), Newt/Thomas (Maze Runner), Past Teresa Agnes/Thomas (Maze Runner) - Relationship, Teresa Agnes & Newt (Maze Runner), Teresa Agnes & Thomas (Maze Runner)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	you taught me the courage of stars before you left

**Author's Note:**

> You can also check out my other TMR fic - the 'impossible' series.
> 
> XD

Newt blinks his eyes open to a sterile white ceiling.

Head muzzy. Temple throbbing. Tongue dry and mouth sour. His eyes are crusted over. He tries to reach up to rub them away when a jarring sensation around his wrists makes him look down.

Someone has dressed him in a short-sleeved shirt, and so the first thing that grabs his attention is the bare skin of his forearms. They’re smooth and pallid – the fluorescent electric lights washing out his skin tone. The bulging black veins snaking up his arms are gone. His head is clear, no longer fogged up with the thick haze of the Flare virus. When he inhales, the oxygen travels unobstructed through his airways and into his lungs.

The relief that washes over him is so strong that he’s almost sick with it. His body sags, and he presses the back of his head hard against the bed to ground himself.

He’s not Cranking up.

For now, at least.

Then he notices the restraints. And the beeping noises.

He’s lying on top of a hospital bed’s white starchy sheets. He’s affixed to the mattress by a kind of tough, stretchy fabric band wrapping over his waist, his wrists immobilized at his sides. There are needles in the crook of his elbow, connected to tubes pumping mystery fluids into his veins. The beeping noise comes from a heart monitor hooked up to him, and the beeping picks up its pace as Newt’s heart starts to race.

The smell of medicine and antiseptic is strong. He looks around, and finds himself staring at his own reflection in the large rectangular mirror on the right wall – he’s a waif of a person. Bloodless skin and pale wispy hair. He blends right in with the bleached whiteness of the sterile bed and walls. The only blemishes are his huge dark eyes.

A one-way mirror. He’s being watched.

He’s starting to struggle when he feels a chilliness spread through his arm – starting from the crook of his elbow, spreading down to the tips of his fingers and up to his shoulder.

He loses the fight to stay conscious. The world darkens at the edges like a photograph burning, paper corners shriveling up and crumbling into blackness.

The next time Newt regains consciousness, the tubes and the heart monitor are gone. The crook of his elbow is colorfully bruised and feels tender. There’s a tray of food on his lap. He’s been propped up in a sitting position, the backrest of the bed levered up to support him, and his hands have been left free. But he’s still confined to the bed with an iron bar over his waist.

He tries to wriggle himself free but gives up after bruising his stomach quite thoroughly and almost tipping over his tray of food. For a moment he suspects they’re trying to poison him, before common sense reminds him that he was unconscious and defenseless for God knows how long, and if he was going to be poisoned, it would have happened by now.

With that, he tucks in. The fare – vegetable soup and mashed potatoes – is light and bland and disappointing. But his empty stomach grumbles in protest and he discovers he can barely choke down even the soup.

The food must be laced with drugs after all, because somehow, he dozes off soon after.

This process repeats several times. He wakes up. He eats. He’s knocked out again.

During his waking hours, he worries endlessly over Tommy and Minho, biting at his fingernails until they’re reduced to bloody stumps. Are they alive?

Are they _dead_?

Newt can’t imagine either of them leaving him here otherwise. The thought of losing either of them, or both, makes him feel as alone as if he’s been abandoned at sea – stranded on a tiny bobbing boat, surrounded by empty ocean and sky, the only life that exists for miles and miles.

He gets no answers. Not about the big whacking scar right over his chest. Not about Tommy and Minho. Not about why he’s not showing signs of the Flare anymore.

No matter how many times he yells at whoever it is that’s bloody monitoring him on the other side of that mirror, they leave Newt to his own devices, stewing in his own worry and uncertainty.

Until one day he wakes up to find his hands immobilized by his sides again, and Teresa Agnes sitting at his bedside.

“ _You_ ,” Newt says in a tone full of venom. If his hands were free, he’d lunge at her.

“Newt.” Teresa meets his gaze unflinchingly. “You need to calm down. You’re safe.”

“You’re with WCKD-”

“And it’s _safe_ ,” she insists. “Look at yourself. WCKD found you in the wreckage. We helped you. We fed you. You haven’t been strung up and drained. You’re not being experimented on. Nothing bad is being done to you.”

Newt looks at Teresa levelly, eyes narrowed with suspicion. He has nothing to say to her. And with himself strapped to the bed, there’s nothing he can do, physically, to stop her talking.

“You’ve been in a coma for a year,” she says, and he gives a start of surprise. “I was starting to think you’d never wake up.”

“And WCKD kept me pumped full of serum anyway?” he asks skeptically, breaking his vow of silence. “What do you want in exchange?”

“ _They_ didn’t do anything.” She avoids his eyes. “It’s a long story.”

“I have nothing but time,” he deadpans.

Still, she hesitates. “Newt… what do you remember about what happened in the Last City?”

“Not much,” he admits.

The last clear memory Newt has is of jumping twenty stories into a pool and having Gally save their collective asses. Everything after that is a flash of prismatic images blurring together. Every time he strains his memory and tries to remember, it’s like traveling through a tunnel lined with broken glass – Tommy and Minho helping him walk, his bad leg dragging behind them. Gunfire in the streets. The sound of screaming and explosions. The Berg soaring over their heads. Forcing Tommy to take his necklace. Pressing a gun to his own head. Swinging a knife wildly. _Tommy_ –

“What happened?” he demands. “Thomas and Minho. Where are they?” His voice shakes in agitation. “Do you have them here?”

“No.” Sadness passes over her face like a cloud. “They’re not here.”

“Are they-” _Dead?_

“As far as I know, Minho made it out.”

“Thomas?” She swallows and looks to the side, not answering. He feels something in his chest twist in acute pain. “No. _No_.”

Squeezing his eyes shut, Newt tries to remember. Fragments of that night return to him – Tommy pinned to the ground with a knife pressing into his chest.

_Newt, please! Please!_

“Was it me?” he asks desperately. “Did I kill him?”

She stares at him blankly for a moment, then her piercing blue eyes widen and she shakes her head hastily. “What? No. No!”

Relief engulfs him, followed by equally strong grief and bitterness. “Then _how_?”

“Thomas-” Her voice cracks on his name. “Thomas’s blood was the Cure. That’s why Brenda wasn’t sick anymore. He Cured her. I figured it out, and I… I announced it to the City.” She takes a shaky breath. “I didn’t know how else to get him to listen. But it was too late.” She looks at him. “You lost control.”

Newt remembers Thomas pinned beneath him, screaming in pain. Thomas desperately trying to get away. The images are like printed fabric, he can see through them.

“We fought.” The words are barely audible.

“You fought.” She nods. “He stabbed you.”

The scar on Newt’s chest seems to twinge at her words. His relief mingles with horror. He can barely believe it. _Tommy stabbed me_.

“They thought you were dead. Thomas came back to WCKD. Janson killed Ava and forced me to make the Cure – he had the Flare. I helped Thomas escape but Janson shot him. We barely got away.”

Teresa’s entire body is shaking. She puts her hands up to her face, holding back her tears.

“We ended up on the roof. Thomas was barely conscious. Everything was on fire… then the building collapsed.” She lowers her head, long black hair falling forward to cover her face. “I hit the water and it cushioned my fall. But _Tom-_ ” She makes a ragged noise and breaks off, unable to continue.

Newt feels a strange numbness spread through him. He watches Teresa cry, feeling almost detached. He remembers the first time he saw Tommy, bursting out of the Box in a run and then almost immediately face-planting. Remembers him disappearing through the closing Doors to save Minho and Alby.

Newt never expected to be the one to outlive him.

“I looked for him,” she says. “After. I thought… I hoped…” She falters. “But I found a body… and then I found you. You looked dead, but when I searched for a pulse-” Her shoulders rise and fall in a single motion. She looks at him with a lost expression. “The Cure Janson wanted to use on himself… I still had it. I used it on you.”

He leans his head back against the pillow and stares up at the chalk-white ceiling. There’s a spider spinning a web in the corner. “What happened to Janson?”

Whatever it is she expects him to say, it’s not that. Her blue eyes harden. “Janson’s dead,” she says. “Tom killed him.”

“Good,” he says.

“Newt-” He feels her tentative touch on his arm.

“Get out.”

“I loved him too-”

“ _Get out!_ ”

The dam breaks and Newt is screaming terrible, terrible things at Teresa. She is crying, tears streaming down her face as she backs away from him in stumbling steps. Her back hits the wall, and a section of it pulls back into the corridor behind it, revealing a doorway. Several pairs of hands reach through it and yank Teresa out, and the doorway closes behind her, reforming into a seamless white wall. Leaving Newt alone as his screaming turns to sobs.

He’s alone for a long time.

“Teresa?”

With difficulty, Teresa tears her gaze away from the glass. “Dr. Morrow,” she greets politely.

The older blonde woman joins her at the viewing glass, both of them watching as Newt paces around and around his room, shooting periodic glowers in their direction, as though he can sense Teresa watching him on the other side of the glass. Some of the color has returned to his face, though he’s still frightfully pale. His eyes are puffy and red-rimmed from crying. His face is screwed up from both anger and grief.

“His recovery is going well,” Dr. Piper Morrow comments.

“It is.” Teresa hesitates, then decides to chance it. “Have you given any thought to my proposal?”

A beat. “I have,” Dr. Morrow replies carefully.

“And?” Teresa says, careful not to let any of her impatience leak into her voice.

“And would it not be prudent to keep the only recipient of the Cure close at hand, where we can study it?”

“There’s a difference between prudence and excessiveness,” Teresa counters evenly. “Subject A5 isn’t Immune. And he might be Cured, but his body still can’t produce the antibodies needed to fight off the Flare. He has the bloodwork of someone who was never Infected, yes. But he’s still susceptible to it. The serum made from Thomas’s blood was intended as a Cure, not a vaccine.”

“You should never have wasted it on him,” Dr. Morrow says with a touch of asperity. “Saving one boy’s life versus the potential to save thousands-”

“I know,” Teresa says. “But all I could think of at the moment was that I couldn’t let _Janson_ have it… not after he killed Ava in cold-blood.” The anger in her voice is unfeigned.

Dr. Morrow sighs. “We should have known something was wrong with Janson. If we’d all paid attention, Ava would still be alive. I don’t blame you for turning against that vile man, Teresa, but after-”

“I thought WCKD was decimated,” Teresa says plainly. She’s getting tired of repeating the same excuses again and again. “I survived, but Tom was gone, and when I found Newt…” She closes her eyes and lets herself remember Thomas’s desperation in the face of Newt’s rapid deterioration. She looks at the older woman, feels her eyes grow wet. “I thought it was what Tom had wanted. I didn’t think there was enough of us left to make a difference.”

Dr. Morrow’s lips are painted a girlish shade of pink. She purses them, her mouth a thin slash of color on her face. “There’s a certain tragic poetry about it,” she murmurs. “And I suppose if we haven’t gotten close to replicating the Cure’s effects after a year, another twelve months won’t make a difference.”

Teresa looks at her. “So I have your permission?”

“You do. Miracles don’t happen very often. And everyone deserves a second chance,” Dr. Morrow says as Newt does one last circuit of the room before throwing himself on the bed. “Where are you planning on taking him?”

“Away. Far away.” It’s been a year, but Teresa still remembers Tom’s scream as she fell with crystal clarity. “This place holds painful memories for the both of us.”

“As it does for us all.” Dr. Morrow sighs. “Such a shame about Thomas. Ava always said he was such a bright boy – he really was our only hope, in the end. If only he’d survived, everything would be different.”

_If only he’d survived._

Teresa hides her hands inside her pockets so Dr. Morrow doesn’t notice them shaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't forget to kudos!
> 
> XD


End file.
